Drone fliers in the USA must soon display their registration markings on the exterior of their craft, rather than as was previously acceptable, in accessible interior compartments. This important but relatively minor regulation change has been announced by the FAA in response to concerns that malicious operators could booby-trap a craft to catch investigators as […]
When you go to a hacker conference, you always hope there’s going to be a hardware badge. This is an interactive piece of custom electronics that gets you in the door while also delighting and entertaining during the con (and hopefully far beyond it). Hot off the presses then is the Hacker Hotel badge, from […]
Microcontrollers come in a broad swathe of capabilities these days. There are the venerable 8-bit micros that have been around forever and valiantly crunch away, all the way up to modern 32-bit powerhouses with advanced peripherals and huge amounts of RAM and ROM. If you’re blinking a few LEDs or opening a garage door, the […]
In the middle of the East Coast’s slow broil in the summer of 2018, a curious phenomenon surfaced. As a tropical air mass settled in and smothered the metropolitan New York area, a certain breed of stock speculator began feeling the financial heat as the microwave signals linking together various data centers and exchanges began […]
Microsoft’s Kinect may not have found success as a gaming peripheral, but recognizing that a depth sensor is too cool to leave for dead, development continued even after Xbox gaming peripherals were discontinued. This week their latest iteration emerged and we can get it in the form of Azure Kinect DK. This is a developer’s […]
Perched atop a dormant volcano far above the roiling tropical air of the Big Island of Hawai’i sit two of the largest optical telescopes in the world. Each 10-meter main mirror is but a single part of a magnificent machine weighing in at some 400 tons that needs to be positioned with incredible precision. Keeping […]
Who says there’s no such thing as magic? Not anyone who knows what a Unix pipe is, that’s for sure. If you do some of your best incantations at a blinking cursor, this scratch-built Raspberry Pi Zero “Spellbook” laptop created by [Kamitech] might be just what the apothecary ordered. Lucky for us, he was kind […]
If you need help visualizing magnetic fields, these slow-motion video captures should educate or captivate you. Flux lines are difficult to describe in words, because magnet shape and strength play a part. It might thus be difficult to visualize what is happening with a conical magnet, for a person used to a bar magnet. We […]